foreword

September 1, 2010. On my guestroom doorsill at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek. The USA Today cover story: “Stadium vs. Home: Can the NFL make being there match what’s on TV?” The newspaper quoted fans who said they would rather stay put—saving money, avoiding traffic, having easier and cheaper access to food and beverage, as well as enjoying a better overall football-viewing experience via their HDTVs. (One former season-ticket holder boasted of having five television screens—and presumably five different games—on simultaneously.) NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, recognizing the rising competition between the in-person and from-home experiences, commented, “We have to bring technology to our stadiums to make that experience better.”¹

This dynamic between the real and the virtual, between atoms and bits, between other-staged and self-directed time, defines the competitive landscape that Joe Pine and Kim Korn so richly explore in the pages that follow. Today, nearly every business must join the NFL in tackling its own “digital media strategy” to contend with the disruptive forces that accompany our electronic age. Pine (my business partner of fifteen years at Strategic Horizons LLP) and Korn (whom I’ve come to know through his in-person participation at our firm’s annual thinkAbout events) provide an invaluable service in expanding the purview for navigating the digital frontier. Many people today merely view this new dynamic in terms of the physical and the virtual. Pine and Korn go beyond these dual domains of (what they term) Reality and Virtuality to define six additional realms that together form octants in a “Multiverse” of infinite possibility that stands before us. The model they present is not easy to digest, for they split three perpendicular coordinate planes (of time, space, and matter) to create a 2 × 2 × 2 framework—enough to frighten away any casual reader. But I urge you to approach the model and their tome like Yogi Berra: When you come to a (three-pronged) fork in the road, take it! Take it: for the journey will open up myriad new ways of thinking more richly about the future of your business.

Knowing Joe Pine has long found inspiration from the work of Stan Davis, I went back and reread the foreword that Stan wrote nearly two decades ago for Joe’s first book, Mass Customization. In it Davis shared two interrelated perspectives: first, how management often mistakenly sees the world in terms of “parts/wholes” instead of holistically pursuing new value-creating forms of business; and second, how executives usually frame most of their decisions around false dichotomies.² This faulty thinking continues to this day: Physical vs. Virtual, Atoms vs. Bits, Stadium vs. Home.

To date, most enterprises have treated new digital technologies as an incremental part tacked onto the existing whole. The results all too frequently intrude on the experience, rather than more subtly and holistically enriching it. A retail bank sticks plasma TVs up on the wall behind its tellers to stream video content irrelevant to the transactions being performed, rather than use digital media in an interactive way to speed up the line. A museum places freestanding kiosks at every turn, unused or abused until sitting in disrepair, instead of designing new ways of technologically introducing context or inciting action that draws patrons into its core exhibits.

Instead of making the real-world experience better, digital technology often worsens it. I’m not one to go to many NFL games, as baseball is my sports passion. After twenty-five years of being a (full) season ticket holder with the Cleveland Indians, I’ve recently discontinued the purchase. Why? Not because my beloved Tribe has lately fielded weaker teams (I actually like watching the young talent develop over time), but because the electronic output on the team’s new $8 million scoreboard—“Whack a Mole” and “Pong” contests, movie trivia, dance competitions, as well as other non-baseball “fan-cam” features—and the blasting of unsolicited music (why is it that sports arenas with these jumbo TVs usually have such poor sound systems?) too greatly detracts from the actual baseball experience. If I want a video experience, I’ll stay at home and watch the MLB Network; for real baseball, I plan to take in the Lorain County Ironmen of the Prospect League top college prospects playing a summer schedule using wood instead of aluminum bats and more importantly, no digital-experience intrusions.

Surely you’ve encountered similar digital intrusions in your life: your teenage children (or your spouse!) texting in their laps at the dinner table; colleagues taking a cellphone call that suddenly and rudely interrupts the face-to-face conversation you were having; high-def screens distracting your dining companion during a restaurant meal; pop-up ads popping up online; and the like. It’s not that new digital content cannot enhance an experience—Virgin America’s use of an animated cartoon in the seatback screens to share flight safety instructions is a vast improvement on the typical audio announcements (again, via poor sound systems) on most other airlines. But too often in too many places the digital element fails to satisfy the objective that Joe Pine and I put forward in The Experience Economy when we called for the creation of experiences (and specifically ones with themes) that “integrate space, matter, and time into a cohesive, realistic whole.”³

Consider the themed place that does just that in the homes of the most fervent NFL fans: the “man cave.” The TV broadcasts scroll scoring updates across the bottom of the screen, with many viewers taking yet further steps to keep up with the action by having multiple TVs or using picture-in-picture to follow more than one game. The room’s furnishings—the deeply cushioned armchairs and recliners, the nearby refrigerator, the ubiquitous cup-holders—enhance the viewing experience. Undoubtedly, colorful team logos and other sports paraphernalia grace the room. Viewers donning customized jerseys manage fantasy football teams and have handheld devices at the ready to check their make-believe rosters at websites like myfantasyleague.com. Between Sundays, the room is used to play PlayStation or Xbox, often replicating game-play of the entire NFL season via EA Sports’ Madden NFL. And if a real NFL game is missed, a Digital Video Recorder allows for watching real games at a different time. (Such well-equipped venues indeed beg the question: Can the NFL make being there match what’s on TV?)

If such man caves demonstrate anything about the whole of life—and the lives of your customers—it’s that more and more of our existence now takes place with a screen. Time with the screen began with our eyes: first the TV screen, then a computer screen, and now a screen held in our hands. And today, we increasingly engage these screens with our hands—not just holding devices containing screens, but touching the screen itself as the means of interacting with digital content. What’s next? The inevitable result: more and more of our minds concerned with what’s on the screen instead of something, anything, (everything?) off the screen. Interestingly, this impact on the eyes-hands-mind mirrors the dimensions of space-matter-time that underlie Pine and Korn’s model: our eyes focus on the space of the screen, our hands manipulate the matter on the screen, and our minds focus upon the content emanating from the screen.

Am I presenting here a false on-/off-screen dichotomy? Well, yes I am, but only because purveyors of the screen have largely treated the digital world as something completely displacing life as we know it.⁴ Consider for example the comments that Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made in an interview with Newsweek in late 2009 concerning Amazon’s Kindle e-reader:

Q: Do you think that the ink-and-paper book will eventually go away?

Bezos: I do …

Q: Do you still read books on paper?

Bezos: Not if I can help it.⁵

This perspective serves as the self-fulfilling prophecy with which Bezos evidently hopes to affix the future state of a world without physical books. His aspirations for Amazon’s electronic-book container reflect the underlying dichotomy that motivates much of what is offered by Amazon and myriad other digital innovators in the marketplace.

But consider some alternative possibilities, ones that reject this either/or physical/virtual trade-off. What if Amazon, instead of offering e-books as a lower-cost alternative versus purchasing physical books, had bundled the physical-and-virtual together and made the purchase of both the lowest cost option for readership. (After all, an electronic copy of any book has an incremental cost of zero, as the digerati like to remind us.) What if they charged more to not send one version or the other? What if certain electronic capabilities were then offered to those who purchased an enhanced version of its Prime membership program? And what if that program actually offered membership to both electronic and physical experiences that fostered conversations between those reading the same books—instead of just providing a cheaper way to ship (more expensive) physical books? What if Amazon saw the electronic world as the primary means of encouraging more people to build physical libraries—promoting greater appreciation for knowledge—instead of just the vehicle to eliminate bound books altogether?⁶

I raise these questions as an expression of my fear concerning the world that may emerge if nontechnologists give Pine and Korn’s book but a cursory read—or worse, if they ignore it altogether and the only serious students of their tome are technologists who believe “there’s nothing special about the place of humans” as “the distinction between the roles of people and computers is starting to dissolve,”⁷ who see any Multiverse as an ideal world where “the intravidual—has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously,”⁸ and who dedicate nearly every waking hour to producing new technologies that do not really meet “basic human needs, because, at bottom, they are … rather aimed at the loftier goal of transcending such mortal concerns altogether.”⁹

I implore readers to ask themselves a series of questions about their businesses (and of themselves as humans working in business enterprises): Do you seek and serve to ultimately have people (including yourself) spend more or less time before a screen? Does your introduction (and personal use) of the digital exist to improve real lives? Or does the non-digital exist primarily to improve digital lives? (There is a point when people do “crossover” this threshold; think of the person who more highly values time in Second Life than in real life; more broadly, consider how many people now spend more waking hours with screens than without them.) Time is the currency of experiences. So how is the value of the experiences you enable as a producer (or enjoy as a consumer) realized—by increasing or decreasing the amount of time devoted to interacting with atoms (or bits), in real (or virtual) space?

Negotiating the future uses of time is precisely what Pine and Korn’s book is about. They are right to point out just how radically different digital technology compares to old analog media. Therefore Think Opposite! Recognize that as the world becomes more customizable, reconfigurable, convergent, instantaneously accessible, and universally connected, what people might value most are offerings that have been customized specifically for them (sparing the hassle of incessantly self-configuring), that diverge from predetermined categories of use, that make customers at certain times and in certain places inaccessible to particular matters. I suspect this is what lies at the center of the Multiverse.

Finally, as more “conversations” are enabled by “social media” (surely the term must soon fade away), recognize that talking past each other is not the same as talking with each other. My hope is that this book will spark many true conversations. Otherwise, as a local ad agency in Cleveland prints on the back of its business cards: “I look forward to ignoring you on LinkedIn.”¹⁰

JAMES H. GILMORE

Coauthor of The Experience Economy and Authenticity
Shaker Heights, Ohio
January 2011